The only neat thing about him, I now knew, was his appearance. I’d seen his filthy house and the literature he devoured. I saluted him because he had fooled me with his appearance. Glen Thorn had taught me something, and that was worth a last good-bye.
IT WAS A SHOTGUN HOUSE with a cottage facade. I went through the next door and found another body. This was the second MP who had accompanied the man who called himself Captain Clarence Miles. This corpse had been strangled, by hand. I could make out the finger marks along his throat and neck. Whereas Glen had no real expression on his face, this man’s eyes and mouth were strained with fear. I would have been scared too if I had been looking into the murderous visage of Christmas Black while he was throttling the life from me.
This room was a kitchen, the body it contained a conundrum. How could Christmas Black, no matter how proficient he was, kill two trained soldiers in two different rooms? There was nowhere to hide in the room where Glen Thorn had died. There wasn’t enough time for Christmas to jump out of some window and come back around. And even if he had used that trick, why leave a perfectly good weapon in the eye of his first victim when there might have been another assassin in the house?
I entered the next room with mounting trepidation. I expected to see Captain Miles, or whoever he was, on the floor with an arrow in his chest.
But the small bedroom was empty. There was just a mattress on the floor and a lamp. The bed was made in flawless military style. There was a window, but it was locked and barred. I looked around for the clues but found none.
Back in the living room, I noticed that one of the legs of the round table had a folded piece of paper underneath it. The table had been rocking, no doubt, something Christmas wouldn’t have stood for.
I expected the wedge to be a take-out menu or a matchbook, but it was a brochure from Beachland Savings in Santa Monica. It promised a free electric fan to anyone who opened a checking account with one hundred dollars or more.
I pocketed the pamphlet and reimagined the murder scene. I tried my best to imagine the second MP coming into the kitchen and being overwhelmed by Black. Even a Green Beret would make some noise killing a man with his bare hands. Where was Thorn when this was happening? Why not kill the first MP with the ice pick and then take the other one out with his hands? Why not use a gun?
The only answer was that there were two men in the first room when the MPs broke in. One of those men, probably Christmas, feigned running into the kitchen while his cohort stood pressed into a corner, as I had done in Tomas Hight’s hallway. Christmas grabbed his pursuer in the kitchen, or maybe he turned and then dragged the unsuspecting MP after him. The other man, Christmas’s cohort, then blindsided Glen Thorn, who must have been concentrating on the fleeing Black. Glen got an ice pick in the eye while his friend was being strangled in the kitchen.
None of that helped me. The only lesson to be learned was to stay out of the way of this juggernaut of death. But I wasn’t a willing student that day.
ON MY WAY OUT, I looked both ways down the street and sighed, relieved that I was in Los Angeles, where there was never anyone on the street to witness anything, not even a black man coming out of a broken door behind which was more mayhem than most honest Angelenos would see in a lifetime.
21
Saul Lynx often said that he thought of me as the unwilling detective. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “It’s not a profession for you. You’re out there to help people because you hate what’s happened. But really you’d rather be reading a book.”
“Wouldn’t everybody rather be rich than workin’?” I asked.
“They tell you that, but most people in a job like ours are driven to be here, peeking through keyholes and mixing with scum.”
Well, I was no longer an unwilling detective. I was voluntarily moving toward a destination even though I had no idea where or what that was.
FOR SOME TIME, Mouse had had a sidetrack girlfriend named Lynne Hua, a Chinese beauty who had appeared in various films and TV shows. She never had more than a line or two, sometimes not even that, but she was gorgeous and worked pretty steadily. She didn’t want to get married or live with anyone, so she was the perfect girlfriend for Mouse, who had the perennial problem of his temporary lovers’ wanting to displace EttaMae to become Mrs. Mouse.
Jesus’s common-law wife, Benita, had been one of these. When she wanted more of Mouse’s attention, he dropped her and she swallowed forty-seven sleeping pills. After taking her to the hospital to pump out the chemicals and restart her heart, I brought her home, where Jesus took care of her like he did all the strays I took in.
I was on my way from downtown LA to Santa Monica when I thought of Lynne. I got off the freeway at La Brea and rode north to Olympic, where Lynne lived on the third floor of a mission-style apartment building.
I had been to Lynne’s before with Ray. I’d drink a glass of club soda with them before they left for some fancy Hollywood party. Lynne couldn’t be a star, but neither did she have to worry about people in the movie business being nonplussed by her being with a black man. No one but her Chinese aunts would be concerned about her dating Ray.
The stairway was rust colored and external, leading upward in a tight spiral. When I got to her door, I stopped and wondered what I’d say if Mouse was there. He wouldn’t like it that I was trying to find him for Etta. No, that wouldn’t be the approach. I needed help because of Christmas, that’s what I would say.
Lynne answered wearing a short red silk kimono with nothing underneath. Her face was made up, and there was a martini glass in her hand. For a moment I thought I had found my wayward friend.
Her lips said, “Hi, Easy,” but the tone in her voice and the way she smiled said, “I wondered when you’d come by alone.”
“Hey, Lynne,” I said, addressing her words, and then added, “Lookin’ for Mouse” to reply to her insinuation.
“He’s not here. But why don’t you come in? I hate drinking alone.”
The centerpiece of Lynne’s apartment was her living room, a large octagonal space with a big, almost wall-size window looking toward the Hollywood Hills. There were bookcases on every wall and a perfectly round yellow sofa, eight feet in diameter, set deliciously off center.
